International Riders Union announces Turdy France protest

The international organization representing the world’s professional cyclists, or CPA, announced today that it would boycott the remainder of the Turdy France unless the organizers, WADA, and the UCI immediately cease the unannounced “Higgs testing” that began July 4 of this year.

With CERN’s confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson, or “God particle,” the World Antidoping Agency simultaneously announced that it had developed a “Higgs test” to determine the presence of the boson in human stool samples. Since the development of an effective test for EPO, physicists have observed that it was only a matter of time before lab testing caught up to what is known in the pro peloton as “Higgs doping.”

Questionable performances

According to Peter Higgs, who first theorized about the existence of the boson in 1964, “It’s quite simple, really. The boson allows multiple identical particles to exist in the same place in the same quantum state. Think about it. A Higgs doper could, by injecting bosons into the bloodstream, allow multiple red blood cells to exist in the same place at the same time. A 49% hematocrit could be packed with three times the official reading’s worth of red blood cells, but never register as elevated.”

When asked if he thought that boson doping was in fact occurring, Dr. Higgs chuckled. “Of course it is. Brad Wiggins has been visiting the Hadron Supercollider in the off season for the last two years. The boy’s dumb as a box of biscuits; d’you think he’s hanging out to brush up on his calculus? That’s the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator, and I think it’s clear he’s been climbing into the chamber and having them shoot bosons up his ass for months.”

Rider outrage at midnight testing

Mark Cavendish, reigning world champion, strongly disagreed with Dr. Higgs. “Fuckin’ dumbass,” said the typically blunt-spoken Cavendish through two feet of gauze from his latest finish-line crash. “We ain’t takin’ no fuckin’ bosons up the ass. We’re fuckin’ bike racers, not particle physicists.”

Jonathan Vaughters, admitted doper and anti-doping advocate, has sided with the cyclists. “The problem we have isn’t with the anti-boson doping programme. Gosh, I’m even willing to let them use the British spelling for ‘program.’ The problem is that these Higgs tests are highly invasive, are carried out late at night, and negatively affect the riders’ performance the following day.”

Adds admitted doper and anti-doping advocate David Millar: “Yeah, mate, that’s pretty much it, ey? Y’crack out 200km in the Tour and just as yer fallin’ asleep, some lab tester in a radiation suit comes in and wants to ram a supercollider tube up yer arse to check yer bunghole fer bosons? C’mon, ‘at’s bloody bullshit. Time they get the Higgs prod outter yer arse, yer wide awake, y’know? Then yer fuggin’ arse is so sore the next day y’can hardly sit on the saddle.”

Last-minute compromise in the works

UCI president Pat McQuaid dismissed the likelihood of a rider walkout. “Bunch of pussies, they’re always complaining about something. Radio bans, traffic furniture, preferential treatment of stars, riders getting killed or catastrophically injured, whatever. Back in my day we made five quid a month, slept on rock beds, sodomized each other between races, and was damn glad to have even that. Bottom line is that if they’re Higgs doping, we have to get to the bottom of it. And there’s no truth to the rumor that the UCI received money for a new supercollider from Team SKY.”

Jean-Patrick-de-Tuileries St. Pou-pou, director of merchandising for the Tour, was more circumspect. “We believe that we will be able to reach a compromise that satisfies the needs of all parties to not suffer another shameful doping scandal. There may in fact be a ‘two-speeds’ peloton, which would explain why the French riders are no longer in the top one hundred. But one cannot be certain.”

P.S. I heard that, prior to the instigation of Higgs tests, David Millar protested on the grounds of veganism. Apparently, he had misheard about the (ahem) particle-lar breakthrough and thought it concerned a Higgs bison.